But from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. –Marcel Proust
Monthly Archive for October, 2009
I don’t know anything about classical music. But because I like what I’ve heard, I decided to attend a free Sunday noon concert at the Hugh Lane. I’d never heard of this series before, but it’s in its thirty-fourth year. The Sunday I was there featured performances by the Fidelio Trio of two pieces by Robert Schumann as well as a world premiere of a piece by Irish composer John McLachlan.
The Schumann pieces were Sonata for violin and piano in A minor, Op.105 and Piano trio No. 2 in F major, Op.80. I liked both of these, especially the first piece, as well as the musicians – Darragh Morgan, violin; Robin Michael, cello; and Mary Dullea, piano.
John McLachlan’s Natural Order was sandwiched between the Schumann pieces, and the Dublin-born composer was in attendance and gave a short introduction beforehand.
McLachlan studied music at the DIT Conservatory of Music, the Royal Irish Academy of Music and in Trinity College. A successful composer, he has received commissions from RTÉ, The Arts Council, Lyric FM, Music Network, The National Concert Hall, and his work has been performed all over the world.
I’ve never heard any of his other work, so I can’t say if Natural Order is a radical change of direction. But it was certainly not Schumann. According to McLachlan’s programme notes, the piece was written combining the usual aural imagining of sounds moving in time with the less common use of chance to generate the order of those sounds. He chose “twenty-seven contrasting and interesting sound objects (nine per player) and created conditions that were designed to make them succeed in an interesting and quasi-melodic way, by creating various types of repetition/development.”
McLachlan then used coin tosses and dice to generate the actual orderings of the piece and ensured maximum engagement from the musicians as they were responsible for choosing the page order of the piece in advance of the performance.
The contrasting and interesting sound objects consisted of Robin Michael playing slap bass on his cello and making strange popping sounds with his mouth while Mary Dullea lifted the lid of her piano and plucked away on the insides with what looked like a pencil. Darragh Morgan played sporadic violin with bow that sounded like barbed wire.
A beautiful melody would come up for air and almost instantly it was gone, buried beneath a barrage of sounds that sometimes resembled a couple of BBC sound effects compilations playing simultaneously. I happen to like music that conceals its melody almost to the point of obliteration, so it worked for me although it was still very frustrating at times. I don’t know what the general consensus was among the audience but, based on the expression on some faces afterwards, quite a few of them were inwardly asking themselves the same question a little boy said aloud to his father about halfway through: “Why are they making those weird noises?”
The Sundays at noon concert series at the Hugh Lane continues on November 1 with Aylish E. Kerrigan, mezzo-soprano and Dearbhla Collins on piano. Admission is free. – Patrick Gleeson
I’ve been away a lot with work this last month. When I’m away on my own, I catch up on my reading and, like everyone in unfamiliar places, I look around me more. One evening in Galway a few weeks ago, I was in the hotel bar, ready to have dinner and perhaps a drink or two before bed. I had a new book with me: Max Blecher’s Scarred Hearts.
Max Blecher, a Romanian, died in 1938. He was twenty-nine years old. When he was twenty-seven years old and dying of tuberculosis of the spine, otherwise known as Pott’s Disease, he wrote to his friend Mihail Sebastian:
“I tell myself that Jules Renard died in 1911. At a distance, death becomes so inconsequential. I just have to imagine that I too died a long time ago, in 1911. I’m not scared of death. Then I’ll rest and sleep. Ah, how well I’ll stretch out, how well I’ll sleep! Listen, I’ve begun to write a novel. But I don’t feel that I absolutely must complete it. If I die first, I don’t think I’ll even regret not having finished it. What a minor thing literature is for me, and how little of my time it takes up!”
Somebody sent me a link this morning to a story in the New York Times about a new publication, based in the US, called Electric Literature.
Apparently I am the last person to know about it.
Basically it is quarterly magazine of literary fiction that you can read – for a fee – on a number of different formats, mostly electronic. You can but it in paperback, and it’s printed on-demand. Or you can buy it for Kindle, for eBook, or for your iPhone. Shortly you’ll be able to get it via audiobook, and a famous American author will soon tweet a story over a couple of days – or something like that. In any case, it’s got everybody very excited because it seems to be very a very popular fee-based way to publish literary fiction.
From the Electric Literature website:
Here’s how our model works: To publish the paperback version of Electric Literature, we use print-on-demand; the eBook, Kindle, iPhone, and audio versions are digital. This eliminates our up-front printing bill. Rather than paying $5,000 to one printer, we pay $1,000 to five writers, ensuring that our writers are paid fairly. Our anthology is available anywhere in the world, overruns aren’t pulped, and our back issues are perpetually in print. We hope that this model can set a precedent: more access for readers, and fairness for writers.
So, five writers get published in each issue, and each publication (so far) includes an American literary heavyweight or two, and each is accompanied by a videos and animation that are essentially trailers for each story. There are even animated videos that interpret single sentences from each story. Like this:
Here are the submission guidelines, and you can submit via email:
No Submission Fees
We pay writers, they don’t pay us. We are proud to support writers who entrust us with their work.No Contests
Every other month, we select five stories for publication. Each writer receives $1,000. This is a payment, not a prize. We value writing, we know how hard it is, and we believe writers are entitled to fair compensation.No Cover Letters
We don’t need to see your resume. All we care about is the story.Grab Us
We are looking for work with a strong voice which hooks us in the first paragraph and doesn’t let go until the final sentence.
The phrase All we care about is the story is disingenuous, considering the fact that the resumes of writers published so far have been shown off like some cannibal who wears the skulls of people he has killed in battle.
Nevertheless, I commiserate. Electric Literature needs to sell. It needs a reputation, etc. Having also used the benedictions and endorsements of more established writers myself (I don’t sell anything, but I want to attract new contributors), it would be disingenuous to criticise them for wanting to make a big deal of the fact that they’re publishing Colson Whitehead, or Rick Moody, or whomever.
On a purely innovative level, this seems interesting, and one scratches one’s head a bit, wondering why he didn’t think of something like this first, since it seems so common-sensical. Five stories every four months, through various media, with low overhead, lots of marketing, professional production, and a lot of obvious enthusiasm for the project of rescuing literary fiction from the swamp of irrelevance.
What’s that? Rescuing literary fiction? How so? Well, the boys at Electric Literature want to make fiction dangerous again. I’m quoting:
What do you mean, “Reading that’s bad for you?”
What else is “bad” for you? A wild night on the town? A decadent meal? Casual sex? Yes, these are all bad for you. But imagine the boredom of a life lived exactly by the rules. More than just pleasures, these experiences open you up to the possibilities of life—the way literature can. We want you to crave a good story like a bad habit.
I once worked a cubicle job. One day I picked up a copy of Dylan Thomas’ Adventures in the Skin Trade on my lunch break, and read as I ate. The stories reflected truth in life which was stifled in mine. Afterward, I found it impossible to return to work.
Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Ulysses, Madam Bovary… these books were banned because they could subvert society. How? Again, by revealing life’s possibilities, expanding consciousness, and exploding social norms. We want to re-introduce the idea that reading can be dangerous.
I was intrigued by everything else: the above made me giggle (inwardly). Give me a fucking break with your dangerous fiction. You can’t publish Colson Whitehead and Michael Cunningham and claim that you’re dangerous. You can’t claim that a wild night on the town followed by casual sex is bad for you and then say you want to be dangerous. To believe that something is bad and then desire to be seen to act badly – there’s a word for that, and it’s not dangerous. People who think they write dangerous fiction remind me of white middle-aged men in the suburbs who drive golf carts too close to greens. “Fuck it,” they say. “Who’s going to stop me?”
And people who think they publish dangerous fiction are like their ethnic middle-aged neighbors who want to be in and high-five the rule breakers at barbecues.
I may have stretched that metaphor a bit too thin.
Now everything is mixed up in my head: graveyards, weddings and the various types of shit. -Samuel Beckett
I remember. Yes, your parents lived in an apartment. An empty apartment beside where you and your sister played. That evening my parents abandoned me at your empty apartment while they went to talk about grown-up matters. I had to ring the bell.
A certain Laura opened the door (or at least that’s what she said her name was); she said she was your secretary. “Do come in, my friend is waiting for you in the lounge.”
I entered, frightened, all ten years of me, with my old Lego and Super Mario Brothers under my arm. That was all I had to offer. It was no trifle.
There you were, in the lounge, in profile like Cleopatra, covering your eyes and smoking a pen.
Last week I posted an entry in this “From the Editor” column in which I praised and recommended the Wexford Festival Opera, discouraged opera first-timers from attending something in Dublin, and broadly condemned the Dublin gig scene.
My arguments against opera in Dublin (for first-timers; I am for opera in Dublin) and against the live music in Dublin may have been weak and illegitimate, but I doubt anyone was surprised by them.
I admit that, in order to say something at all about the gig scene in Ireland, I had to plumb the depths of my indignation. I do think music by the bands I’ve seen here is without exception all the things I stated in that post. But I felt this way in Austin, Texas, in the 1990s, and everywhere else I have lived – even London.
I wish I had not said anything, because I have given the impression I am so angry about incompetence and pretension in the gig scene that I had to attack it. In fact, I do not care at all.
I also really like going to the opera in Dublin, but anyone who saw Don Giovanni at the Gaiety in March, 2009, would agree that a first-timer would watch that and never go again. If you want to nurture a deep and lasting appreciation of opera, and you’ve never seen opera before, I would still recommend starting somewhere else. I would say that in the same way I would tell somebody in Des Moines, who had never seen The Marriage of Figaro, not to see it first in Iowa. I’m sure numerous specific examples contradict this intuition. I invite reviews.
My attempt, in the comments section of the Wexford Opera post, to call out a name-dropping piece in the Irish Times for misspelling a name it was trying to use to add to its own importance was accused of name-dropping itself. I nearly defended myself. But it turns out I do not even care about that. I am guilty and not guilty of everything I am accused of.
I have, previously, disparaged people who look forward to drinking in Grogan’s, but I do not care about wannabes and posers. They are not exclusive to Grogan’s, anyway. I have criticized lazy, star-gazing journalism (the comparison between Garrison Keillor and Homer comes to mind), but I do not normally read papers and don’t care what is in them. I regularly attack literary journals in the US and Ireland, but I don’t care; they can do what they like.
This blog has made me seek, in myself, hatred for the things I normally mildly dislike or never bother with, therefore I must rummage through the places (like newspapers) I normally avoid, therefore I manufacture disdain.
This “From the Editor” column began in late March, 2009, as part of an expansion of the original, very very lo-fi Some Blind Alleys (I was using blogspot software back then). I wanted to write something that explained why I created this thing – the online journal – in the first place, and I also wanted to add to the site’s content and level of activity. And I thought it might be nice, from time to time, to rant a bit, or praise something that deserved it.
Now I have begun to despise the blog because of what it has turned me into – somebody who, with ten minutes free to write something, conjures up the very faintest displeasure and serves it to an audience as profound offense.
Additionally, it has obliterated within me the desire to write – or at least write more personal essays. I quite like writing personal essays, and while the world will certainly not suffer for the lack of them, neither would it suffer if the throwaway vilifications this blog seems to be obsessed with were to vanish.
An essayist must live, in his or her mind, in solitude, in total rejection of all his or her tastes, prejudices, expectations.
In this blog, I have increasingly created the equivalent of bad reality television. Every time I think the camera is on me, I pretend to be annoyed. The fact is, I am not annoyed by very much. Or rather, I am always annoyed by something, but who cares?
I have been trying to think of what could possibly replace the activity that this column provides. It can’t be reviews. They don’t come in often enough. Posting Plugs every day would be too much like a data entry job. I thought about running an Arts Journalism section, but the NUJ would probably break my wrists if I didn’t pay freelancers (I’m in the NUJ; I’m not poor-mouthing it). And worse: an Arts Journalism column would give the exact opposite impression that this blog does – that there are really countless and innumerable wonderfulnesses to expose in arts and culture, when we, even setting our faint indignation aside, know this is not the case.
If this were my job, I’d be able to use the blog to explore new areas myself – such as journalism, criticism, etc. I’d interview some interesting people, perhaps. Who knows?
But one thing is certain: activity in the “From the Editor” section has to go down. A very busy phase for Some Blind Alleys, the journal, will pass this week – it will be over at exactly 5:30 p.m., Thursday, October 29. After that, I look forward to spending a lot more time reading submissions, editing, commissioning, thinking about the spring 2010 masterclass, etc.
Pictured (L-R): Cathy Sweeney, winner of the Some Blind Alleys 2009 Writing Competition, story category; Susan Leahy, winner in the essay category; Nora Butler, winner in the translation category; Anne Enright, novelist and special guest. Taken at the launch of Some Blind Alleys, The Joinery, October 16, 2009.
Photo: Feargal Ward.
More contributor news… And this one is slightly urgent, since it’s happening on October 25. I was browsing Poetry Ireland’s Events Calendar (long story) and saw that Jaki McCarrick, who contributed an essay about Auden and Kavanagh called “I’ll tell you the name of the greatest living poet,” will have her play Leopoldville read out in Galway.
From Poetry Ireland’s website:
Jaki McCarrick, a Poetry Ireland Introductions Series 2009 poet, has won 2nd prize in the 2009 Kings Cross Award for New Writing for her play Leopoldville. A rehearsed reading of Leopoldville is taking place as part of the Galway Theatre Festival.
Venue: Nuns Island Theatre, Galway
Admission: Contact Galway Arts Centre for Tickets
It’s a good week to be a Some Blind Alleys regular contributor. Rob Hopkins, who’s working on a long nonfiction project about his life in the US as a down-and-out tree surgeon, has brought the personal essay to the Stinging Fly, a quarterly journal in Dublin that primarily focuses on fiction and poetry by emerging writers.
Read Hopkins’s “Crackhead” here on Some Blind Alleys.
"Greg Baxter is an essayist and fiction writer with a mission: to get Dubliners reading good literature." 
